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“... that they take sides. In The Silent Woman (1994), her openly partisan study of Plath biography, Janet Malcolm insists that this is unavoidable: ‘As the reader knows, I, too, have taken a side.’ One flier for her book stated: ‘A writer finds Ted Hughes innocent but biographies as a group guilty,’ which suggests the process is interminable and ...”

“... detail. Was there really no note for Peter? And why does Christopher feel the need to tell us so? Janet Malcolm recently published a short fragment from an abandoned autobiography, explaining why journalists should not memorialise themselves. Another obstacle in the way of the journalist turned autobiographer is the pose of objectivity into which ...”

“... light, and told false stories about their life together. (‘The silence of the famous dead,’ as Janet Malcolm put it, ‘offers an enormous temptation to the self-promoting living.’) Alma even interfered with Mahler’s compositions, demanding – based on her authority as the widow – that the middle movements of his Sixth Symphony be reordered ...”

“... which has been roundly condemned not only by the estate but in reviews by such as Craig Raine and Janet Malcolm, is yet further evidence that accusations of betrayal and threats of violence are likely to engulf anyone who tries to interpret the Hughes-Plath saga and its aftermath. Jacqueline Rose inspired a ferocious epistolary assault from Hughes for ...”

“... Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth) and the fictionalised portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry – it may feel at times as if we’ve made this expedition before, with Claire Bloom hovering overhead.But buoyancy ...”

“... Hitchcock said that this revolution in movie habits was necessary because having seen Janet Leigh’s starry name on the awning, people who arrived halfway through the movie would spend the rest of the film wondering where she was. I remember it clearly, although I wasn’t old enough to get in to see the X-rated Psycho when it came out. In the ...”

“... bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with stones, crushed her under a door piled with rocks, then ran her over with a cart. Cornfoot’s lynching may seem ...”

“... hangs up male and female laundry to dry separately. When Reverend Gwyon takes on simple-minded Janet as a kitchen maid, the household is able to match the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm for individual and collective oddity, though comedy here is an uninvited guest.Any account of an oppressive religious upbringing risks being overshadowed by Gosse’s ...”

“... common with the second. Direct democracy and representative democracy remain poles apart. In 2010, Malcolm Gladwell was widely criticised for an article he wrote in the New Yorker about the Iranian ‘green’ revolution, which disputed the far-reaching political effects of social networking. ‘The revolution will not be tweeted,’ Gladwell insisted. The ...”

“... down to killing someone.’One of the shorter pieces in the collection is Carrère’s review of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1989). He admires the way Malcolm exposes the games writers play to entrap their subjects. But he has one objection: his own innocence. ‘At the risk of transforming this ...”

“... a beautiful man, smoked cigars, and was pursued from race to race by a gaggle of female fans. (Sir Malcolm Campbell of Bluebird fame called her – apparently without irony – ‘the greatest sportsman I know’.) Special ‘friends’ included the lesbian actresses Tallulah Bankhead and Gwen Farrar. Carstairs, the Evening News reported in 1925, could ...”

“... point, early in 1915, when Brittain, still at Somerville, contemplates enlisting as a VAD nurse: Janet Adie came to tea to help me learn to typewrite. She is feeling very busy because she now has the secretaryship of one of those soup-kitchen affairs on her shoulders. It does not sound very strenuous occupation; these people who never had anything to do ...”